An impressively synoptic treatment of a complex and important subject.
Sullivan provides a comprehensive overview and sharp critique of the ways in which innocent children are harmed by the criminal justice system.
The author, an associate professor of international studies and global affairs at St. Mary’s University, begins his remarkably thorough study by observing that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world; while this is pointed out often enough, the consequences of this fact for the children of those imprisoned and detained is a strangely neglected subject. Sullivan focuses on these “collateral consequences,” the many ways in which the blameless children of those arrested, detained, or deported suffer from a “vicarious punishment.” Several categories of these sanctions are explored, including the denial of citizenship to the children of non-citizens deported or detained, family separations imposed at the border that leave children without their parents, the “denationalization” of children of those accused of terrorist activity, and the separation of Indigenous children from families that were seen as resistant to full assimilation. The author prosecutes a persuasive case detailing the unacceptable imbalance between the needs of preventive justice and deterrence on the one hand and the rights of children on the other: “Preventive justice approaches prioritize risk management over individual civil liberties and the presumption of innocence.” He discusses the practice of meting out “stealth punishments disguised as administrative sanctions,” disingenuously strategic ways to legally impose harsh penalties upon those who have committed no crime. Sullivan also lucidly discusses technically prohibitive subjects such as competing theories of punishment, rendered in admirably accessible language. The author can advocate too unreservedly for rehabilitation, especially given its spotty empirical track record. And some may object to the idea that, in the case of detention for an immigration violation, job training and education should be provided to “help the detainee to grow as a human being,” as this assertion goes far beyond the respect of individual liberties. Still, this is a rigorously researched and argued assessment of the ways in which the criminal justice system unduly disadvantages children who have committed no offense.
An impressively synoptic treatment of a complex and important subject.Pub Date: May 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780197671238
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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